


(kiss) Today, Goodbye

by Metallic_Sweet



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: (the sweetness and the sorrow), Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Immortals and Mortals, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Odin's A+ Parenting, Post-Canon, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 11:32:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metallic_Sweet/pseuds/Metallic_Sweet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of the journey, there remained one last truth: they were never meant to be kings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(kiss) Today, Goodbye

Loki used to be achingly, horribly jealous of Thor.

When Loki thinks back upon that jealousy that he once held, how he coveted it and nurtured it, of the depth to which he sunk in its molasses grasp, he can't help but marvel just a bit at how things have changed, how wrong he was. He wonders at how he could have once been on the cusp of hating Thor, of forgetting all that they shared in favor of the poisoned balm of imagined wrongs. How little he knew. How much he assumed.

"You and your 'what ifs'," Thor scoffs when Loki murmurs these thoughts in the dim starlight of this moonless world. "Sometimes I wonder if you think enough about what is."

Loki snorts, tosses a bit more kindling into the campfire. Above them, a creature rustles through the sparse canopy of trees. Loki doesn't need to look to know Thor is tracking its movement in the shadows, can hear it deep into the dark.

"At least I think," Loki murmurs, stretching out on his pallet for the night. "If it was left up to you, all we would have is what we do."

 

The first time they returned to Asgard after Thor discovered he was Jörð's get, they both nearly died.

"I told you so," Loki remembers saying, even though it hurt to talk, let alone breathe.

"You would waste your breath on that," Thor had groaned in a moment of rare sarcasm, which was enough with the adrenaline and subsiding panic to make Loki laugh until it hurt too much to continue.

Thor's wounds healed slower in the aftermath of their hasty and ill-planned revenge though they were initially less serious than Loki's. It took all of Loki's knowledge and willpower to pull Thor from the darkness his mind sank into once the fever took hold, and Loki cannot remember a time when he was more frightened, not even when he himself had found that he was not a prince of Asgard but rather the get of monsters. Those twelve days and nights that he tended Thor, as he pulled at his brother's mind and spirit even as they slipped further and further away: he no longer needed to convince himself of petty jealousy, hate, or even envy.

Such feelings had never been there, not really.

 

Jane dies on a Thursday afternoon, tucked against Thor's side in the setting sun, Loki watching the road behind them. He helped Thor steal her from the hospice she had resided in for the past year, left an image behind in the room and rigged the machines. It is a trick he perfected when he still wished to play the villain of the Nine Realms, and it reminds him of Victor, how such little tricks once brought a spark to eyes that only expected doom.

(Loki remembers, too, how he put Victor in the ground, sealing him away in his precious metal and Midgard's dirt. It was what Victor would have wanted, not the proper funeral of fire and sea. He left the mask and wrapped Victor in a cape and allowed himself, for the first and only time, to kiss his metal brow.)

"I could have made her Queen," Thor whispers, and his voice is almost lost in the summer wind; "I could have saved her from this."

"The fate of mortals is not to be altered," Loki says, and it is unkind because it is true. "You know this, Thor."

"I do," Thor says, and it brings no comfort to him, nor the corpse in his arms. "But can I wish I did not?"

Loki presses his fingers briefly to Thor's lips, kisses the tear tracks on his cheeks. "No," he whispers against the shell of his brother's ear, more honest than he has been in so many years, "because that way lies madness."

 

The second time they returned to Asgard was the only time they returned separately, Thor first in chains, Loki three days later through the paths between. It was the last time that Loki visited his old quarters, still strangely untouched despite all that had passed. He took from them what little he wished to still possess: his knives, a scrying crystal, and the stash of golden apples he had hoarded over time. Loki had known by then he didn't really need the apples, Jotun, monster, and sorcerer he had always been, but they were useful as bargaining tools if nothing else.

"Thor, we cannot stay."

Thor had looked back despite Loki's pull on his wrist, had paused on the edge of the path Loki had opened between worlds to gaze at the palace that he had called home, that had imprisoned him on sight, that now held a bounty upon his head worth more than Loki's. 

Loki bit the inside of his left cheek hard enough to draw blood.

"Thor," he begged, "please."

 

Only Rogers is left of the first Avengers, the Super Soldier serum maintaining him in ways even golden apples cannot achieve. Once, years ago now, Loki had sought to replicate the serum, a moment of true selfishness, unable as he had been to face Victor's aging. It was the first time that someone had seen him truly bare upon Midgard, the bitter taste of impossibility the first true drug of reality against his madness.

"It is not for me," Loki had admitted, had not been able to lie. "Oh, if only it was so simple."

Rogers is painful, so very much so, for Loki to be around, let alone look upon; he is the last of Thor's merry mortal band. Thus, they visit Rogers once or twice a Midgardian year in the small cabin in the Appalachian Mountains that Rogers moved to after Peter Parker died. Thor and Rogers talk for hours, reminicing over the past, all the good and bad times. Loki threads his fingertips over the oak trees, twisting hemlock needles between his fingers.

"Travel with us," Thor requests as Rogers makes a dinner of potatoes and beef stew. "Loki discovers new worlds nearly every week."

"They are not my discoveries," Loki mutters, though he knows Thor will not hear him. "They are worlds that have always existed, just beyond the reach of most."

But Rogers always declines, murmurring the same line that Midgard is his home, and he cannot simply abandon it. Thor grimaces on the line, bitter as Asgard has become in his thoughts, but Loki can understand in the distant way he's come to accept, two hundred years too late.

Thor is Loki's home, and it's only to Thor Loki can go.

 

They don't love each other, not like that.

If it was that way, Loki wouldn't have to pick up the pieces of Thor's heart, have to piece the shards back together when each mortal Thor falls for inevitably crumbles beneath the weight of time. He wouldn't find himself looking sideway from the paths between, to the edges where the branches of Yggdrasil dip and curve into the unknown. He would not have to smell Thor's tears in the night; he would not have nearly as many shameful wounds.

They don't love each other, not like that.

 

"Asgard," Loki snarls, and the word comes out less like a place and more like a curse, "is a horrible realm."

Thor sighs, presses more of the poltice into the deep, jagged wound left by a lucky guard's spear. Loki does not know if his brother sighs because he despairs for Loki, finds the task of healer demeaning, or still dislikes hearing his former home disparaged. Loki groans, although he isn't sure if it is more for the pain of the wound or Thor's strange obtuseness. The fever burning and steadily climbing within his flesh must have a lot to do with Loki's unusual confusion.

"We should never return there," Loki mutters as Thor dresses the wound with Midgardian bandages. "We should leave it to rot."

"Loki," Thor sighs, tired and worn and defeated, "please shut up."

Loki spends the next several days drifting fitfully in and out of sleep, unable to press himself into the true unconsciousness needed to begin healing. The spear was angled and Loki can feel how he continues to bleed sluggishly deep inside of his own flesh. He tries, when he is lucid enough to string thoughts together that aren't mad, fevered ranting (about Odin, about Asgard, about, in a moment of weakness, Victor), to guide Thor through what needs to be done, but it is difficult to concentrate on anything, let alone healing himself.

It is on the seventh day that Loki awakes for the first time since collapsing from the initial pain and blood loss of the injury with his wits about him. Thor knows it immediately, can tell, Loki suspects, from the way Loki does not speak immediately upon waking. They are silent as Thor helps clean and redress the wound, a dull sort of exhaustion blanketing them.

"I had not known you loved him," Thor says, stinted and awkward, as Loki begins to finally sink into a true, healing sleep.

"I never meant to," Loki admits because he is tired and aching, and there is nothing now that Thor does not know. "It would have been better if he meant nothing at all."

 

Victor had been a means to an end, at least at first.

Loki does not know exactly when that changed, when between the two of them something grew and found root and flourished. Sometimes, when Loki can think back without too much pain, he can pinpoint the moment when he found that Victor could make him smile, really smile, not the mimickry of the expression he had grown so used to by then. Victor hadn't seemed to know he'd done it, hadn't included a real smile from Loki in his equations and schemes. In that moment, they had both been caught off-guard, Victor with an uncalculated jest and Loki with an honest smile.

From there, things between them had changed. Sure, they schemed and manipulated each other all the same, but the current that existed between them was different, tighter yet more elastic, electric but strangely calm. It wasn't something they really ever discussed, not even the rare times where they let what lay between them take hold and guide them in their private interactions. They were never close enough to truly understand each other, but what they had was enough.

"I always knew you would see me die," Victor had said, old and wizened and finally accepting of his mortal fate. "I didn't expect you to be at my side."

Loki remembers laughing through his tears, all his masks stripped from him even as Victor kept his. "You are the only mortal who has earned that right."

"To be so honored," Victor murmured, and Loki could tell his confession had greatly pleased him, arrogant mortal that Victor had always been. "I suppose I'm glad to die with that."

It was for Victor that Loki wept bitterly, the first time he'd done so since Sleipnir was taken from him. He wept enough that it made him ill after he'd buried Victor and set what had been left to right. This, Loki understands, is why he should never have come to Midgard, why Odin always viewed it as a dirty, uncivilized place. Death and grieving are not aspects of mortal life meant to be survived by gods and those not born with such concerns.

Loki knows loosing Victor wreaked something deep inside of himself, and perhaps that is what Victor needed to be: an example that, no matter how far Loki had ever fallen, there lay something worth it all at the bottom of everything.

 

"The grass," Rogers says, "is always greener on the other side."

Loki stares out over the metal and glass world, the great skyscrapers that once characterized New York City now dwarfed by the network of tubes and platforms and grime that stretches ever upward into the smog-soaked Migardian sky. He closes his eyes, leaning against the cold glass, and remembers a park, a muzzle, and the smell of fresh air.

"It has become so ugly," he remembers saying to Rogers the first time he and Thor returned to New York after Stark's death. "It was always ugly, but now so much more so."

He wishes that Thor didn't insist on returning here, to the tower that was once Stark's and then his children's and now his great-grandchildren's. Whenever they return, they stay on Thor's floor, the only part that has remained untouched, and Loki looks at the trickets and things and has to endure the memory of what once was and will never be again.

"It is grand," Thor says. "It is full of good memories."

Loki squeezes his eyes shut and does not say that is exactly why they should stay away.

 

It is the last time they return to Asgard. 

"Please," Thor begs, hands in Loki's cloak. "Please." 

He stands, once more, on the edge of the Bifröst.

"You have always," Thor weeps, "been my equal."

He never wanted to be king.

 

They visit, after so many years gone, Jane's grave. Thor brings her flowers from the last world they visited, strange, spindling springs that will wilt in the soot-soaked Midgardian atmosphere. Loki allows Thor a bit of magic to preserve the delicate petals a bit longer, gives him at least a bit of comfort. It is a concession to Thor's unmitigated grief. 

It shows, too, how close they've grown.


End file.
